What the Looky-loos Don’t See
I ran away into a poem and hid
for a while and
for a while all was fine and dandy
and then…
I don’t know what happened but
I opened my eyes
and everyone was staring at me.
Poems, sadly,
grant scant protection from gawkers
and nosey parkers.
Now why this would surprise me
I have no idea.
People don’t understand poems
or me and so
it seemed a perfect fit to my mind;
I blend right in:
a fleck of dirt in a bucket of sand.
Jim Murdoch grew up in Burns Country in Scotland. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevance—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in 1973 his teacher handed out barely-legible copies of Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ and he felt as if the scales had fallen from his eyes: How could something so seemingly unpoetic be poetry? He set out to answer that and the nature of poetry has been a recurring theme in his work ever since.
For ten years Jim ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but he now lives quietly down the road from where they filmed Gregory’s Girl with his wife and (increasingly) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.
DIY MFA 